Re: Dropbox and "Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge"

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Jul 23, 2022, 14:38 UTC
Message-ID: <YtwH7pOnDgv+MYmh@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAMhVC3acU06uBDAjd5LEiCvuf8=XW_1RYVVt7CdKr-JqB7cRFA@mail.gmail.com>

On 2022-07-23 at 12:40:20, Yuri Kanivetsky wrote:

> Hi,

Hey,

Show 9 quoted lines

> First I thought it's an issue with vim-fugitive, but I can reproduce
> it with git alone. The other culprits I can think of are magit (I
> believe I used it with this repository), vim, and now that I think
> about it... Dropbox? The repository is in a dropbox directory. I
> understand that this is uncommon, but a couple of my repositories are
> in a dropbox directory and I'd like to put the reasons aside. Can you
> suggest what I can do to find the reason it fails? Do you know what
> exactly triggers this message (the content changed, modification time,
> ctime)?

It's known that Dropbox and other cloud syncing services can corrupt repositories. They can cause files to be removed, renamed, or reappear after being deleted, and I suspect that's what's happening here.

I'd definitely suggest moving your repository out of the Dropbox folder and seeing if you can reproduce the problem. That will tell you if that's the problem you're having.

I'd recommend moving the data out of the Dropbox repository regardless, since, as I mentioned, it is known to cause corruption, and you won't know it until it's too late. You may want to additionally run "git fsck" to see if that finds any problems other than dangling objects.

-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA